Conclusion

Summary

What implications does this book have for the study of South Asian history? In a recent historiographical intervention, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam invited further comparative reflections on the Mughals and their counterparts and contemporaries. In addition, they noted how the “sensitive matter of ‘eighteenth-century decline’” should be examined not only by following the fortunes of the late Mughal dynasty, but by turning to the perspectives of those polities and agents whose fates became implicated with the devolution of power in South Asia – regional successor states, middling social groups, and, of course, the East India Company state.¹ As the preceding chapters sought to argue, these empirical and analytical themes are unquestionably important in giving us a fuller and richer understanding of how political culture in South Asia transformed after the Mughals. Yet, as this study has also contended, regional histories from the Subcontinent perhaps alone cannot tell the entire story. By turning to a transregional regime of circulation like the hajj pilgrimage – an “old” terrain of exchange with the Middle East that the Mughals actively helped establish – we ultimately acquire another set of perspectives on how “new” political cultures emerged in South Asia as the Timurid empire entered its long century of decline and decentralization.